Adversaries commonly use radar to track radar-guided missiles and other airborne targets; for example, pulsed or continuous radio waves may be projected toward potential targets, and the reflections of these waves analyzed to locate the potential target or determine its heading and velocity. Advanced radar detection systems may utilize complicated pulse waveforms more broadly distributed across the radio frequency (RF) spectrum.
A target or potential target may deploy chaff as a radar countermeasure; for example, a cloud of metallic or reflective objects may be deployed to reflect radar waves so as to confuse the radar detection system with multiple or misleading target returns which may suggest a false position of the target or obscure its true position. However, conventional chaff may be of limited utility; for example, individual chaff components have no means of propulsion and thus, to the extent that a cloud of chaff may represent a false or misleading position of a target, it may provide only a static position. Similarly, the reflectivity of conventional chaff may depend greatly on the surveillance frequencies used. Towable decoys may provide more credibly false returns to surveillance radar, but the decoys may not be a cost-effective option. Similarly, a target aircraft may employ onboard digital RF memory (DRFM) to generate false echo signals representing a “ghost” decoy target. While the ghost target may prove a reusable and programmable decoy (e.g., a decoy presenting the illusion of motion toward the detector), DRFM systems may be even more prohibitively expensive than towable decoys (e.g., by a cost factor ten times or above that of the towable decoy).